“I have a dream”

I want to “rag chew” with other hams in Europe. Africa, Australia and the Orient once every day.

I have waited years for the next sunspot cycle, but the bands were worse than ever. I have given up on the luck factor of a band opening. Is Skype the solution? EME, yes moonbounce, it’s the only logical guaranteed ham radio method for daily communication.

So what frequency is the best? HF is not correct because the antenna must have circular polarization to eliminate QSB which will always occur when the moon is moving away from or towards the antenna. Microwave has been used, but not very many hams all over the world have the test equipment and knowledge needed to run high power. So I am left with 2 meters or 6 meters. I believe more hams are trying to get their DXCC on 6 meters than on 2 meters. They already have large antenna arrays and high power amps, but not circular polarization. Guess what? That doesn't matter. As long as I have circular polarization there will not be QSB. I have chosen 50.222 MHz.

In order to achieve my dream, I know that I will have to do the “heavy lifting”. So lets start with an 80 element two axis circular polarized antenna. Then add two 1500 Watt ultra linear power amplifiers from the old channel 2 TV stations along with 8 very low noise receive amplifiers (LNA’s). Then I got a Flex 6500 SDR and 8 very high isolation, high power coaxial relays. Guess what, I could easily make CW, or digital contacts, but not phone. I am now 85% done with all the hardware and have not done any new work for years. The path loss requires more gain. A lot more gain.

This is my solution for more gain. Gain is gain. It doesn’t matter if it is power gain, antenna gain or compression gain  So what is compression gain? Single sideband (SSB) bandwidth is about 2700 Hz wide. If that could be reduced to 125 Hz bandwidth, there must be about 13 dB compression gain. So how do you do that? Voice has 4 parts: Speech, Timing, Pitch (tone) and Amplitude. If only the speech were sent, bandwidth could be saved. But it turns out that timing is also needed. How do you know when to switch from receive to transmit? This compression gain is done as a digital mode that I like to call “Digital Speech within 125 Hz bandwidth ” ( DS-125 ). But I do not know how to write software. I know exactly what I want to do, but don’t know how to do it.

So my dream is dead unless someone else starts doing my software. Thousands of dollars later I am about 1/3 done with the software, but freelancers don't care about ham radio.